Drawing Research Forum 2025/26 Sessions – Part 1

The session will feature presentations and a plenary discussion with artists examining diverse themes, and utilising and developing current discourse around contemporary drawing.  The Drawing Research Forum provides a space for knowledge exchange between disciplines, encourages cross-fertilization of ideas and methodology, and fosters collaborations between artists and researchers.

Presentations include:

• Dr. Christine Checinska – Drawing as a Practice of Freedom
• Tintin Wulia – Drawing and Drawings as Things-in-Common: the Aesthetic Agency of Mark-making in Sociopolitically Engaged Art
• Yeonjoo Cho – Experimental Life Drawing: Beyond What You See

View full programme here

Dr. Christine Checinska is an artist, designer, curator and storyteller. She exhibited work in the group shows’ The Missing Thread’, Somerset House, London, 2023-2024 and ‘Folded Life’, Johanne Jacobs Museum, Zurich, February 2021. Her solo show, ‘The Arrivants’, was exhibited at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg in 2015. Christine is currently the V&A’s Senior Curator of Africa and Diaspora Textiles and Fashion, and Lead Curator of the international touring exhibition ‘Africa Fashion’. She served on the Costume Institute at the Met’s Advisory Committee for the 2025 show ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’. She will take up a research fellowship at Yale Centre for British Art later this year and an artist’s residency at G.A.S. Lagos in 2026. Christine was a co-curator of ‘Makers Eye: Stories of Craft’, Crafts Council Gallery, London, 2021. Her recent publications include ‘Material Practices of Caribbean Artists Throughout the Diaspora’, in ‘Crafting Kinship: A Visual Journal of Black Caribbean Makers’ (2024).

Dr Tintin Wulia has explored the sociopolitical role of aesthetics for 25 years as an artist, focusing on borders and state security. She is Senior Researcher at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg—leading the European Research Council-funded project ‘Things for Politics’ Sake: Aesthetic Objects and Social Change’ (2023-28)—and Visiting Research Fellow at International History, London School of Economics and Political Science/LSE (2024-25). Wulia has contributed to over 200 exhibitions and publications, including Venice Biennale (representing Indonesia, 2017), the Q1-ranked Journal of Political Power (2023), the retrospective ‘Tintin Wulia: Things-in-Commo’n at Hiroshima MoCA (2024-25), and the upcoming ‘Asia Now Paris’ (2025).

Yeonjoo Cho – is a Korean artist and researcher based in Seoul, South Korea and Glasgow, United Kingdom. Centred on the tropes and ideas of ‘Oriental Painting’, her work explores the boundaries and intersections of cultures. Based on her background of oscillating between South Korea and the UK, her latest work showcased paintings and drawings which focus on experiences of move and migration and narratives of cultural others and hybrids.  Cho studied painting and art history at Ewha Womans University and completed her interdisciplinary PhD research which employs contemporary art practice, art history, and postcolonial discourses as three key columns. Her work has been exhibited in various cities in the UK and South Korea, including institutions such as the Scottish Royal Academy, Edinburgh City Art Centre, Cambridge University, Cheongju Creative Art Studio, Uijeongbu Art Centre, and SeMA-Buk Seoul Museum of Art.